Prediction: by the time you read this, the joint US-Israeli operation in Iran will be all but over. In fact, it had mostly ended by the start of April. The Kool-Aid-dispensing press has been telling us since the conflict began that Iran was winning. They wanted it so badly to be true. Being adept at magical thinking, they also believe that what they wanted to be the case would suddenly, hey presto, become the case. A cover story in the Economist declared “Advantage Iran.” “A month of bombing Iran,” that once-sober publication announced, “has achieved nothing… For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.”
Not to be outdone, the Financial Times weighed in with “Iran could emerge from the war stronger and more dangerous.” Right. Iran’s navy? Sunk. Its air force? Destroyed. Its stockpiles of missiles and drones? Incinerated. Ditto its military infrastructure. Its leadership? Eliminated down two or three levels, not just the turban-sporting mullahs but also the IRGC commanders, Basij thugs and senior scientists: all gone to their 72 virgins.
I loved this exchange between Donald Trump and a reporter:
REPORTER: “The Iranian government threatened a bunch of US companies in the region today.”
DJT: “With what? What did they threaten them with? BB guns? They don’t have much left to threaten.”
REPORTER: “My question for you is –”
DJT: “You made a statement. What did they threaten them with? I don’t know. Tell me. How did they threaten them?”
REPORTER: “All I know is that they threatened them, sir.”
DJT: “They said something nasty?”
Mean tweets, possibly. One theme that the propaganda press has wheeled out time and again is that Operation Epic Fury has no clear strategy or goal. They say this on the tried and true totalitarian gambit that repeating a lie often enough makes the lie come, or seem to come, true. When President Trump first announced the operation, on March 1, he clearly laid out his goals. Prime Minister Netanyahu did the same. Spokesmen for both governments have periodically reiterated those goals to an obstinate press that, like a patient suffering from Tourette syndrome, keeps yelling “quagmire,” “exit strategy,” “endless war.” They just can’t help it.
Repetitio mater memoriae. Iran, the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism, must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. In order to prevent that, President Trump said on March 1: “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. We are going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has frequently recapitulated these themes. Just the other day, he made explicit something that has typically been lurking only half said in the background. Some people would say it has to do with religion. In fact, it has to do with the lunatic deformation of religion that is Shia Islam. “Under no circumstances,” Rubio said, “can a country run by radical Shia clerics with an apocalyptic vision of the future ever possess nuclear weapons, and under no circumstances can they be allowed to hide and protect that program and their ambitions behind a shield of missiles and drones that no one can do anything about.”
To those who keep asking “Why now?”, Rubio was as clear and bracing as a mountain stream. “We were on the verge of an Iran that had so many missiles and so many drones, that no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons program in the future. That was an intolerable risk. This was our last best chance to eliminate that conventional threat, that conventional shield that they were trying to build, and the President made the right decision to wipe it out now.”
From the very beginning of this operation, President Trump has emphasized that there were two dimensions to Operation Epic Fury. One was military. The goal of that part of the operation was to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, smash its offensive military capability and eliminate the personnel carrying out its repressive agenda of destruction. That goal has been accomplished.
The second dimension involved a direct appeal to the Iranian people, the 90-odd percent of the population that loathes the Islamic regime and has suffered under its theocratic repression for the past 47 years. “When we are finished,” President Trump urged, “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”
How differently the world would have been had Trump not exercised precautions so robustly
This was not a military effort aimed at regime change. It was a military effort to clear the way, to make it possible for the people to choose the government that best suited their needs.
Throughout the last month, we have been told time and again by the putatively omniscient press that Epic Fury was not about the things that President Trump said it was about. Really, we were told, it was about oil, or China, or Israel. But the 18th-century philosopher Joseph Butler was wiser than our know-it-alls. Everything, that canny bishop noted, “is what it is and not another thing.”
Butler was arguing against the selfishness theory of man, the idea that whatever someone says he is doing something for, “really,” “at bottom,” he is doing it for selfish reasons. Butler made the inestimably important distinction between doing something out of an interest which is one’s own – who else’s could it be? – and doing something for self-interested reasons. Trump has been warning about Iran’s nuclear ambitions at least since 1987. But the reflexively anti-Trump media can’t abide the thought that he might be acting out of principle for the reasons that he stated.
A final thought from the great translator of Plato, Benjamin Jowett. “Precautions are always blamed,” Jowett observed, “because when they are successful they are said to have been unnecessary.”
A rational person shudders at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Islamist Iran. Then, on the contrary, there are the carping chihuahuas of the anti-Trump press. Expect an abundance of blaming as Trump takes his victory lap. How different the world would have been had Trump not exercised precautions so robustly.
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